“It is just what you did,” Williams says. And sometimes, in the years after, there would be something, an odor from somewhere, that would bring that back to me.”įrom 1945 to 1962, Williams pushed the feeling away with gallons of beer at his local VFW. There is an odor that emanates from that, that is like no other odor on earth. (He lost Ruby, his wife of 63 years, to a heart attack in 2007.) “A person’s life taken by flame is so, so horrible. “I had a tremendous amount of difficulty because I couldn’t forgive myself for having to take so many lives in such a horrible, horrible way,” Williams says today, speaking from his home in West Virginia, where he lives alone. Nor could he forgive himself for the many lives he took, and the manner in which he took them-at close range with a flamethrower. But for 17 years after the war ended, Williams didn’t share much about his time overseas. Williams, now 94 years old and the last surviving Medal of Honor recipient from the Battle of Iwo Jima, and the last surviving Marine to have won the honor in World War II, is at ease speaking candidly about his experiences. Day after day, he went about his business, betraying no hint of the emotional burdens and mental scarring he endured on the front lines of one of World War II’s bloodiest battles.
He was loved by his wife and two children. In the two decades after Woody Williams came home from the war, he was the man everyone expected him to be. So you point your stack of 200-round clips at the big gun and paste down the fire button.His heroism in World War II earned him the Medal of Honor, but that was just the beginning of his story. What follows is the Ranger experience in microcosm - rather than picking off insurgents as they appear on rooftops and behind sandbags, and inching toward a turret gun in the gaps that it gives you while it reloads, you just need to suppress. You're danger close, however, so you first need to lace it with red phosphorous before nearby F-15s can blow it off the mountain. Having cleared the village and moved through a gulley, your squad of four needs to take out a DShK gun emplacement by calling in air support. From behind the sights the Rangers are exactly as you would expect: there's lots of chatter, moving up, instructions to cover each other and enemies at every hand of the clock.Īrmed with a SAW machine gun, you're a heavy weapon within a blunt instrument. To do this we have to break through a run-down mountainside village overrun by insurgents. It leaves our party in a position where it's necessary to clear a landing zone for a Casevac helicopter. This content is hosted on an external platform, which will only display it if you accept targeting cookies. As the Rangers advance through a valley they're assailed on all sides and take heavy casualties. We pick up the controller as a Ranger squad led by Jim Patterson - grandson of Lieutenant Jimmy Patterson from the original Medal of Honor, released in 1999 - drops in and discovers that the military has underestimated its opponent quite considerably. The sledgehammer that is the US Army Rangers arrives in Shahikot confident and gung-ho, but no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Goodrich describes the game's first act for us before we sit down to play. After all, were the game set somewhere else, that would be all anybody cared about. We're also looking for signs that Medal of Honor is more than just Call of Duty with beards and goats instead of nukes and skidoos. We're looking for the authenticity, respect for the soldier and reverence for the material that Goodrich insists were the developers' only motivations for using a current conflict as the backdrop for the game.
That's where we are today, prowling through the variable conditions of the 12-kilometre span of the Shahikot Valley in Afghanistan which Danger Close has recreated in Medal of Honor. "It's an historical fiction inspired by these guys in an historical event, like Saving Private Ryan. "The story that we wanted to tell was about these guys in this initial fight, and the individuals that we hooked up with happened to be doing it there, so that was the story we wanted to tell," says executive producer Greg Goodrich. There's a group of Rangers, who go in hard and fast and leave in a cloud of brickdust and cordite a pair of Apache gun crews, who back them up from the air and the Tier One Operators, the best of the best of the best to infinity recurring. Danger Close - the developer formerly known as EA Los Angeles - has been adamant about one thing throughout its work on the single-player campaign for this Medal of Honor reboot: it's not about the setting, it's about the individuals.